Good evening,
Tonight, I’m unveiling a new project that I’m working on called All Protocol Devs. It’s a series intended to help foster connections between full-time protocol developers in the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.
Despite the open-source nature of Bitcoin and Ethereum, development on these protocols is largely siloed. This is primarily due to the highly decentralized nature of these developer communities and the depth of specialization that is often required to contribute meaningfully to these protocols.
All Protocol Devs is intended to create spaces for connection both within these developer communities and between them. More on the idea and how to get involved below.
Yours truly,
Christine D. Kim
🔔 Programming note: Starting next week, this newsletter will switch from a twice-weekly cadence to once weekly to focus on higher-signal developments in Ethereum protocol development.
Most decisions and topics covered on Monday’s All Core Developers (ACD) calls are reiterated on the Thursday calls, and are, at times, unnecessary to cover on a weekly basis.
(As a side note, for these reasons, Ethereum developers are currently discussing reducing the cadence of the Monday calls or making them seasonal.)
🗒️ Call Minutes
(For background on the ACD process and jargon used on these calls, refer to the Ethereum Governance 101 document in the ACD Toolkit.)
First, here’s a quick summary of the latest Ethereum developer call, All Core Developers Testing (ACDT) #72.
Announcements
Future execution specifications fixture releases from the Ethereum Foundation (EF) Testing team will follow a different directory layout.
Previously, fixture files accumulated test cases for every target fork in a single file, meaning each file grew with every new fork.
Fixtures are now split into per-fork sub-directories, keeping file sizes bounded and allowing more targeted testing of client codebases.
Blob-Devnet-0
Blob-Devnet-0 testing partial cell proofs is still running.
Consensus layer (CL) client teams are encouraged to join the devnet as soon as their partial cell proof implementations are ready for testing.
Bal-Devnet-2
Bal-Devnet-2, testing the execution layer (EL) code changes for the Glamsterdam upgrade, is still running.
The Ethrex and Erigon clients were recently added to the devnet.
Developers will soon begin running stateful tests and benchmarking analysis on Bal-Devnet-2.
Bal-Devnet-3
All remaining open pull requests (PRs) for Bal-Devnet-3 will be merged over the next few days. If there are any objections to them, developers are encouraged to comment on GitHub as soon as possible.
Client teams reported that they are ready for a Bal-Devnet-3 launch later this week.
Epbs-Devnet-0
Client teams also reported that they are ready for an Epbs-Devnet-0 launch later this week.
Epbs-Devnet-0 will test the consensus layer (CL) code changes for the Glamsterdam upgrade.
Nft-Devnet-10
Nft-Devnet-10, testing the new Ethereum networking protocol, eth/70, is still running.
Besu recently joined the devnet. Reth will be added this week.
Perf-Devnet-3
Perf-Devnet-3, testing Ethereum at higher state size and growth levels, is also still running.
Nethermind and Reth are experiencing issues on the devnet that developers are currently investigating.
Jochem Brouwer, an engineer on the EF Protocol Prototyping team, presented a new tool for testing clients in large state environments. The tool, dubbed “state actor,” can be found here.
🌕 That’s all for my summary of ACDT #72. Continue reading for my insights on Ethereum development and governance. To read the rest of the newsletter, make sure you are signed up for a premium subscription:
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🔎 Insights
(Quotes featured in this section may be edited for grammar and clarity. For more information on the people quoted in this section, refer to the ACD Call Directory in the ACD Toolkit.)
Over the course of my eight-year career reporting on and researching open-source blockchain protocols, I’ve been struck by the lack of cross-collaboration between developers.
On the one hand, this is understandable across different protocols. Full-time developers are often constrained by time, energy, and bandwidth. Engaging deeply with contributors from other ecosystems may not feel like a priority, especially if those ecosystems are viewed as competitors or, worse, as illegitimate scams.
But what has surprised me more is that even developers working on the same protocol can feel siloed.
